Build a LEGO Skeleton Model

Here’s a fun life science activity with LEGO bricks! Challenge kids to use their bricks to build a human skeleton model.

Doing something hands-on with the information kids are learning, such as building a model, helps kids put this information into their long-term memory. If you’re studying the skeletal system, this is the perfect activity. There’s so much benefit to the process of designing the skeleton model, labeling the bones, and then explaining the whole project to a parent, teacher, or their classmates.

We built our skeleton model as a mosaic, and I think that’s the easiest way to approach this project. It also makes use of the simplest bricks. However, if you have some talented LEGO builders and a large collection of bricks, you may want to try building a 3D LEGO skeleton model.

Recommended Ages: I would recommend this project for upper elementary through middle school, or ages 8 through 12 or 13.

The human body has 206 bones, so it won’t be realistic to build them all with LEGO bricks, or any other building material for that matter. The goal here is to remember the names, shapes, and locations of the major bones in the body.

Supplies Needed:

Two 32 x 32 baseplates – you can use any color, but we chose blue
White bricks in all shapes and sizes
Black bricks for the eye, nose, and mouth openings in the skull

I used a 2 x 2 round brick for the patella, or knee cap. It worked well!

Since you’re working with LEGO bricks and not a pencil and paper, you’ll have to make some decisions about how to represent individual bones.

It was hard to make a distinction between the radius and ulna, and between the tibia and fibula. In both cases, one bone is narrower than the other, but that wasn’t possible to build at the scale we were using. It also didn’t work to leave a gap between the bones without the leg looking WAY too wide. So instead, I used plates for ulna and the fibula, and bricks for the radius and tibia. That at least created a distinction between the two.